Monday, February 10, 2014

At Berkeley, BAMN's Self-Indulgence Hurts Defenders of Public Higher Education

By Any Means Necessary. Members of this group have been distributing
leaflets on UC Berkeley’s campus for months now. Their website describes BAMN as a “coalition
to defend affirmative action, integration and immigrant rights and fight for
equality by any means necessary”.

I am instinctively sympathetic to groups
interested in preserving the public character of the University of
California. Today, that University
system has been much degraded. It is now
public in name only because—in the absence of support from California’s public—the
primary burden is borne not by taxpayers, but rather by individual students and
their families in the form of sky-high tuition.
An enormous cadre of administrators—the
growth in whose numbers corresponds suspiciously with the decline of the
University community as a whole—works to find ways to cut corners and cosy
up to the private sector. And while
Berkeley’s current Chancellor has made sympathetic noises towards advocates of
the public university, his predecessor was open about his desire to break-up
the UC community and begin the work of formal privatisation.

In such circumstances, we need strong
action, and groups possessed of BAMN’s aspirations could play a leading
role. But to this point such groups have
consistently and deliberately chosen to ignore the political economy in which
the University of California is inextricably embedded, and to indulge in
inaccurate rhetoric about campaigns which would do little to nothing to improve
UC’s plight.

In the summer of 2009 I attended a
meeting comprising members of the campus community invested in acting and
speaking out against the skyrocketing fees.
But most of those present evinced little interest in building a
community-wide movement which would require doing the hard work of explaining
the source of UC’s decline, and instead wanted to focus on throwing toilet
paper at the then-Chancellor, and in staging events designed to suggest that
cutting administrative salaries could put UC back on safe footing and restore
its public character.

BAMN is working in this tradition. Robert Birgeneau, Berkeley’s Chancellor in
2009, proved himself no friend to public higher education, and his contemporary
as UC President, Mark Yudof, was openly contemptuous of his community. Napolitano has shown herself much more
sympathetic than either of them—or at least better at expressing that
sympathy. And if even a little bit of
that sympathy is genuine, I wager that she would be a more effective advocate
for UC than the most well-meaning academic given her knowledge of the very political
process by which UC secures funding from the state.

More to the point, if BAMN members
somehow ousted Napolitano and replaced her with the candidate of their choice,
exactly nothing would have occurred to make UC better off. Because however much administrative salaries
might have risen to the detriment of the campus as a whole, nothing the UC
President could do would come anywhere near to offsetting the steep decline in
state funding that UC has seen over the past decades, a process which quickened
apace beginning around 2008.

BAMN and like-minded organisations have
insisted on focussing on the “bad guys” on campus, ensuring that their campaign
remains ill-informed and retains not the slightest prospect of actually helping
UC. They are ensuring that the cruel caricature
of student activists—as young people who lash out in an ill-informed and
misjudged manner—is actually given credence.

The real threats to the University of
California comes from elsewhere.

On the one hand, there is California’s
cynical and disenchanted public, itself largely ignorant of the inconsistencies
it creates through its voting habits.
The public mistrusts politicians, and with good reason. But the public ignores its own culpability in
our state’s dysfunctional politics, an appraisal which is hardly honest given
that voters act effectively act as an un-integrated branch of government in the
state. And voters apportion blame evenly
across party lines when most of the state’s ills stem from the efforts of
California’s Republican Party to fashion the state as a laboratory for its
twisted economic fundamentalism. The
Republican Party has worked tirelessly since Ronald Reagan’s governorship to
sabotage the workings of state government and thereby foster distrust and
disengagement in the public.

The institutional political right is
aided in these efforts by its usual supporters: irresponsible members of the
upper classes who don’t think they share any responsibility for their fellow
citizens, and corporations which seek to enlarge their profits by creating a
welfare state designed to support their own well-being rather than that of the
public.

UC’s other worst enemy is the very
method by which Californians have historically sought to protect themselves
from the predations of special interests: political reform. California is now governed less by the formal
political class its citizens love to hate than by a series of interlocking
initiatives, representing a grab-bag of aspirations voiced discordantly by
successive generations. (For a good
account of the state’s structural impasse, read Mark Paul and Joe Mathews’ California Crackup: How Reform Broke the
Golden State and How We Can Fix It.)

The infamous Proposition 13 is a good
example. A measure sold by big property
owners to voters as homeowner protection has turned into a multi-generation giveaway
for the wealthy which simultaneously allows the state to be governed by an
unrepresentative minority and kills off the public sphere, damaging schools,
universities, libraries, and parks, while inhibiting our ability to create the
infrastructure which our society requires in the twenty-first century.

So when BAMN blames UC’s administrative
rot and tries to tell us either that removing Napolitano is a priority, or that
removing Napolitano is something which would help the University, they are
exhibiting either great ignorance or great dishonesty. If they want a law to focus on, Prop 13
deserves much blame. If they want a
wider cause, an overhaul of the state’s political apparatus to address our
democratic deficit is long overdue. If
they want to blame an individual, California’s GOP offers its share of
villains, and our Governor, Jerry
Brown, has proven himself to be a formidable obstacle to progress in the Golden
State.

UC’s survival as a public institution is
on the line, and this is no moment to be wasting time and energy on political
efforts which not only look unlikely to succeed, but which would do nothing to
address the cultural, ideological, and structural sources of our decline.

There is real work to be done in
addressing economic inequality, pushing back against the assault on the public
sphere, and restoring key attributes of democracy to our governing system. And yet BAMN and its supporters look like
they are prepared to do anything to ensure that they fail in their efforts to
save UC. Their self-indulgence has no
place in a serious campaign to address the degradation of California’s great
institutions of learning.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.